Opening A Dirty Can Of Worms

Today its been weird reading through my RSS Feeds, after reading all these posts surrounding the controversy and mud slinging around the sponsored Themes debate. I’ve been very confused. People in the WordPress Community are not what they seem. I still stand by my opinion that what Matt and Mark Gosh did was the right thing, but some of the posts have been real eye openers. In the end the only thing I can say is to move forward and to forget and forgive. Everyone makes mistakes and we need to learn from our mistakes.

The bottom line is the people that are actually helping others without ulterior motives should receive more recognition and rewards, not that they’re asking for it. Second, debates and everyone involved should be more transparent. Third, don’t trust everything you read. Fourth, don’t trust everyone you meet.

Unlike Matt, some of the people that have berated me, called me names and disparaged my work, are people that I respect, who were in touch with me frequently and on whom I have spent a lot of time and effort on promotion in the past (and for the record, will continue to promote in the future). The negative responses were not fun to read through but the positives were also very heartening and encouraging.

Let me say that it is very hard for me to turn the other cheek but that is what I choose to do and I will not add fuel to the fire.

Ultimately I know my software isn’t going to change anyone’s spots. Good people will do good things with it, and bad people will do bad things with it — regardless of any protections I put in place. Windows Vista, a multi-billion dollar enterprise, was cracked within days. Does any piddling encoding I can do in PHP really matter? If protection like that isn’t broken it’s a statement of popularity, not security. I suppose could harass the bad guys, shut down their host, send them scary letters, but it’s just going to stress me out and like cockroaches they’ll pop up someplace else. I also know that most projects, software, and ideas die from obscurity, not piracy.

When was the last time someone discussed design? My memory fails me, as far as I remember, people have only overtly exhibited their cheap thrills in pulling others down. Kissing ass is different, doing real work is different. Why should anyone work for free? Which world are we living in? Mark Ghosh, you are either an American or an Indian or both, if I am right? America and India are both capitalistic economies, I don’t think capitalism is bad or evil.

What is bad and needs to be controlled is individual wrong practices and for that, you have no choice but to check each and every theme, no matter how time-consuming and painful the process be. There are no excuses.

So we are not trying to wait it out or anything like that, we are just as sick of it as y’all are so let’s get this thing done and over with. Today will not go down in history as the day WordPress died; in fact it’s the opposite. In my opinion, WordPress is the best open source CMS out there, and can remain that way if we all took the chill pill and got our acts together.

Talking about acts, here’s a confession to add for your weekend gossip, Mark and I have lived a dual life for the past 4 months on WordPress both as designers and as the moderator of themes.wordpress.net, yes we were cleaning out the mess and doing the dirty job while Matt and Mark (Gosh) were busy smearing us with the tar of being the bad guys. But as Matt would thanklessly say, “no one asked us to do it”, we volunteered!